Daughter of the King

The message came through right in the middle of the busy and crazy of my day. I was trying to balance pages of readings, an outline for an essay and making sure my caffeine intake was adequate for the task. And it was right there on my screen, pain, real life pain, a long side my blinking cursor. At first I’m not sure what to do with it, not sure how to respond. What do you say when someone half a world away opens wounds and lays bare their heart? How can you possibly staunch the flow with pixelated platitudes?

I don’t respond at first. I leave it and let her cry for help just tumble around my brain and her hurt squeeze my own heart. “Dear Lord,” I whisper, “how?” And in that moment I know I don’t have what she needs to hear. I don’t have the words that will soothe and encourage. But her pain, what she is struggling with, I have felt. I know those feelings of being lost and lonely in world that is louder than it needs to be.

My soul stirs as those old memories of inadequacy and comparison begin once again to whirl around the murky waters of discontent. Yes I know these feelings, I am well acquainted with their grief. And my spirit groans in time with her own, even though the miles and borders separate us. I utter unintelligibly to my Father because I have no words for the moment.

Those feelings of unworthiness, the constant searching and uncovering of approval? They are exhausting. I have walked those roads and there are still days when their paths lay wide before me in a dark yawn of discontent and I find myself wandering into the unlit and dangerous territory of comparison.

Why can’t I write like that author?Why can’t I have cute looking blog like her?Why does she get all the attention on Twitter/Facebook and I don’t?

So we craft our perfectly prosed Tweets and status updates. We spend far too long drafting a reply to our favourite blogger, author, artist and then madly check our feeds to find out whether or not our cleverness was a hit.

And… the silence, it’s deafening. Defeating. Depressing.

We forget so easily who we are, who we were created to be. We are never satisfied with being the enough that God intended for us to be. Someone else has it better, someone else knows more, someone else is more gifted and we slowly begin to bury ourselves in our inadequacy. And as we heap more self-doubt and unworthiness onto our over-burdened shoulders our voices are silenced in the deafening roar of not enough.

“Daughter of the King.” That is finally what I message back to her. After we’ve talked and unpacked our need for approval I remind her that she is daughter of the King. That the approval of man fades with time, words and lovely comments are soon forgotten. She is a daughter of the King even if her words never get read or published. Even if no one ever replies to a single Tweet or becomes her Facebook friend.

She has one true identity that was bought with the life blood of a Saviour and it is hers forever. When He conquered death, when He defeated the grave He arose and covered her with a robe of glorious grace and said her name for all to hear…Daughter of the King.